Erich Kleiber Conducts = BEETHOVEN: Fidelio Overture, Op. 72b; SCHUBERT: Symphony No. 9 in C Major, D. 944 “Great”; BERG: Three Scenes from Wozzeck – Annelies Kupper, soprano/Cologne Radio-Symphony Orchestra/Knabenchor/Erich Kleiber
MediciArts MM027-2, 76:01 **** [Distr. by Naxos]:
Culled from two distinct Cologne concerts, this disc presents veteran Erich Kleiber (1890-1956) at the helm of the Cologne Radio-Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble he first encountered in 1953. An impeccable conductor whose musicianship found equal dignity in his moral character, Kleiber came to repute in 1923 in a performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio, whose overture he unleashes (7 January 1956) shortly before his premature death. Light and fleet of foot, it explodes in homogeneous fury for the last page.
The Schubert C Major Symphony and Berg excerpts derive from the same concert of 23 November 1953. The immediacy of warm color that permeates the Schubert, its distilled Viennese affect, dominates the entire conception. Kleiber takes the opening Andante marking as a leisurely swagger, the underlying five-note riff already generating a counter-rhythm that soon proves prodigious. The ensuing Allegro non troppo bristles with clarity and pungent syncopations. The attention to string, woodwind and brass antiphons transcends the details into a marvelously fluent mix, on a par with the admired readings of Furtwaengler, Mengelberg, and Toscanini. The wicked accents that lead to the French horn punctuations of four notes at first beguile then swell to torrential proportions. Great flute work prior to the final peroration in the first movement, a sustained crescendo that has the strings sizzling and trumpets blazing.
The kernel of the symphony, the Andante con moto, may lack Furtwaengler’s mysticism, but it retains the exquisite balance of bucolic rusticity and kinetic, poignant power. After an exalted Trio section, the da capo offers any number of subtle color touches in woodwind timbre and cross-rhythms. Even with the flurries and periodic explosions of sound, that “heavenly length” in Schubert remains unruffled, a serenity beneath the panoply of colors. More fervent attacks in the Scherzo, the birds chirping through and between the martial, tympanic outpourings of mountain spirits. The edgy wind timbre alone–not to mention an utterly magical Trio–connects Schubert to Mahler, a composer we can only wish Kleiber had bequeathed us in his stingy recorded legacy. Hang onto your musical hat for the relentless Finale: Allegro vivace, a Viennese task-master’s Technicolor dream come true. That the symphony never loses its innate singing voice for the furor of the conception is a miracle of rare device.
The concert ends with some twenty minutes of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck, a work Kleiber promoted at the Berlin State Opera in 1923 and 1925, when he presented the world’s first atonal opera. Soprano Annelies Kupper (1906-1987) delivers Marie’s part with the requisite, eerie angst and ingenuous, victimized puzzlement. After the Schubert, Berg’s tonal world appears at once familiar and a vision from the Nebula in Andromeda. Marie’s opening flurry after the martial antics of the orchestral postlude of Act I, Scene 3 stabs us with her guilty tryst with the Drum-Major. For Act 3 Scene 1 Marie’s outbursts contrast with the reminiscences of nursery rhymes and St. Mark’s gospel as related to her hapless child. Every enunciation, every slide and speech-parlando, slithers in agony like a dying declaration. The snakes abound in the final selection from Act 3, Scene 5, Ringel, Ringel, Rosenkranz, which invokes Marie’s ghastly murder by Wozzeck as their son frolics on his hobby-horse, his friends having left to gaze at her dead body. In spite of percussive effects and agonized discordances, the remnants of Wagner’s Tristan still creep through the morass of human degradation. Powerful, nightmarish. And heartily recommended.
— Gary Lemco
